Be Yourself

Young Americans, music lovers, art aficionados. There's an interesting habit that runs through these groups: People love transgression. People love rule-breaking, nose-thumbing, and non-fuck-giving. We find them exciting. We'd prefer not to get too wrapped up in which rules are being broken, or who's having noses thumbed in their direction-- it's the act itself we love so much. Trangression for its own sake! It's "rock'n'roll"; it's "punk"; it's "art." It's coded into our whole conception of rebellious young people and pop music, and into our Romantic concept of the artist, and probably into the American character itself. Sometimes you'll hear people suggest rules in its favor: "Any art that's pissing people off must be doing its job." "The purpose of art is to offend our sensibilities."

Often this translates into something slightly different: "Any art that's pissing other people off must be doing its job." "The purpose of art is to offend the sensibilities of people I already hold in contempt."

Earlier this month, the New Yorker's Kelefa Sanneh appeared on CBC radio to talk about his latest article. I promise you that this column is not about the subject of that article (Odd Future, about whom you've likely read enough), or the moral dimensions of their lyrics. But there's something Sanneh said when asked about those lyrics-- specifically, the ones coming from Tyler, the Creator. "He wants to convey that sense of heedlessness," Sanneh said, "that sense of not caring about what anyone says."

Notice the way that claim is set up: It says the message being conveyed is the heedlessness itself. Whichever specific norms get violated to convey it are almost beside the point. We're usually after the posture, not the details. We could probably all agree that some transgressions are more useful than others-- that some norms deserve to be challenged and others are actually pretty sound. But the process of sorting them out can feel like a responsibility: It involves things like complex thought and serious moral reasoning, which are, admittedly, not always a party. Whereas the feeling of the transgression itself-- that one presents, to plenty of people, as a kind of heedless freedom. It's nearly addictive.

The great smart notion Lady Gaga had was to reconnect that sense of rule-breaking and freedom with the notion of Just Being Yourself. Nearly everything about her is predicated on the idea that simply being and expressing yourself is a radical, transgressive act. Part of why that's convincing is that she situates her whole aesthetic in the world of people who really do inherently defy society just by being themselves: anyone who's gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, obviously, but also women who want to command any power or respect, and immigrants, and even the ambitious artist, or the ordinary person who insists she's a superstar. (That kind of thinking offends the world's sense of modesty.) At times she collapses all this into one thing, such that the transgression of wearing a dress made out of meat operates (it's suggested) on sort of the same principle as the transgression of wanting to serve in the military while openly gay.

At some point it becomes one-size-fits-all. Because as it happens, the vast majority of young American humans have something about them they're convinced the world is assaulting and oppressing, whether that thing is huge or tiny. How can we not love someone who tells us we can be bad-assed transgressors simply by... doing exactly what we want anyway?

Gaga is, for the record, very good at harnessing this message. Her new album, Born This Way, works the theme harder than ever, but now with an added commercial bonus: Her own superstar success starts to look like proof that radical self-expression works, that you can be celebrated and rewarded for it. That core idea has been so successful that nearly every other white woman toward the top of the charts has tried it on as well-- Ke$ha, Katy Perry, P!nk, all of them telling you to be yourself, bravely and heedlessly, No Matter What Anyone Says.

I don't want to be cynical about this idea, but there's something about it that nags at me. It feels incomplete. Yes, it's a generous sort of freedom to offer people, and there are endless numbers of us who actually need it-- people who need that inspiration to trust and follow their own desires. Yes, it's nicely universal: Tell us to be ourselves and love ourselves, and leave us to sort out the unique and personal question of exactly who we are, anyway. It's that rare sound of people trying to harness transgression toward healthy and positive ends.

But for me, at least, the thrill of it ends very quickly, and leads straight back into complicated questions. Aren't "be yourself" and "be what you want to be" totally different instructions? Who do I aspire to be, and how do I get there? These may sound like airy, navel-gazing questions, but they're exactly the sorts of things I turn to music and art to help me figure out. After all, every song you listen to is showing you another new way of existing in the world, and letting you try it on for size. Your record collection contains a thousand different ways of feeling love, a thousand different ways of feeling powerful, and countless different poses and postures you can take toward the world around you. A huge part of why I listen to music is to understand new ones.

The constant hymn of Being and Expressing Yourself-- that's another way of feeling powerful and free, yes. But while it offers us a style to live in, it doesn't actually tell us all that much about how to live. It inspires us to express ourselves, but isn't always much help in figuring out what self to express. At some point it begins to feel like all anyone's saying is that we should all say what we want to say. But what about the strange and complicated part where we figure out what that is?

I'm sure asking this makes me, to paraphrase Gaga, all drag and no queen. But it seems important-- especially in a world that's already prone to fall in love with brave, heedless postures for the postures themselves, instead of what they might mean.